Soft Fiction Sales Continue Into June

Unit sales of print books fell 2% in the week ended June 3, 2018, compared to the similar week in 2017, at outlets that report to NDP BookScan.

For the third week in a row, it was softness in the fiction categories that led to the decline. Unit sales dropped 5% in both the adult and juvenile fiction categories compared to the week ended June 4, 2017.

In adult fiction, Stephen King’s The Outsiderremained in first place on the category bestseller list, selling nearly 52,000 copies. Seven of the top 10 bestselling titles in the category were new books, with Shelter in Place by Nora Roberts at #2, selling more than 41,000 copies, while Christine Feehan’s mass market paperback Shadow Keeper was third, selling almost 21,000 copies.

Overall, the top 100 adult fiction titles sold 100,000 fewer copies in the week ended June 3, 2018, than in the similar week last year. The 5% decline in juvenile fiction was also largely due to weakness among the top 100 bestsellers and not because of the release of a blockbuster title last year.

Sales were particularly soft among young adult fiction titles, where sales of the top 100 books fell 29% in the week compared to 2017. In 2018, Victoria Aveyard’s War Storm was the top young adult fiction title, selling almost 7,000 copies, while a year ago Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything was #1 in young adult, selling more than 21,000 copies.

Print unit sales rose by less than 1% in adult nonfiction over 2017. The category had a new #1 bestseller with Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, a D&D guide, in the top spot, selling more than 35,000 copies in its first week on sale. Another new book, Calypso by David Sedaris, landed in the third spot with over 21,000 copies sold.

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